A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator • Hacker News Board

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#741

Post by zahlman » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #398

safety1st wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one. They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c... Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else…

The reason why Reddit is being "investigated" in this way is clearly and without any doubt political and has nothing to do with Reddit's moderation. There are strong anti-free-speech forces in the USA currently, and Reddit is #1 on their target list. Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.

Many years ago, I looked at front-page threads on r/socialism and found blatant, undeniable calls to political violence all over the place. It was way worse than anything I'd ever seen on r/TheDonald. My reports to the admins went ignored, as far as I could tell.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#742

Post by zahlman » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #300

safety1st wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one. They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c... Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else…

What country are you from? To " wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there? Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing. Do you think it is wrong to wish a dictator dead? Over the past decades USA has not only wished it, but made it happen, at the cost of many lives.

> What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?

This is a strawman. Your quoted text does not come from GP and does not fairly represent any of its argument (which makes your use of italics hard to understand).

Actual incitement to political violence is actually occurring on these platforms. People have screencaps and everything.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#743

Post by jghn » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

user34283 wrote: post #542

hilios wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/conservative doesn't even allow comments of users without a user flair. They state: "This is designed so that a couple posts per day are almost guaranteed to have conversation which is not hijacked by leftists and other non-conservatives.Who Gets Flair? Only mods can assign User Flair, and User Flair is only for conservatives. Once you have a solid history of comments in /r/Conservative, and have been commenting i…

You're not a conservative. Why are you so concerned about participation criteria for the conservative subreddit, one of the only distinctly right wing places on the whole platform?

Part of the problem is the mods' narrow definition of "conservative". And this is the larger point of this entire comment thread. There are plenty of people with traditional conservative values who are not welcome in r/conservative. Not to mention, over time the tent has been shrinking as well.

Which, to be fair, is not unlike how the GOP has been operating over the last few years.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#744

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

firesteelrain wrote: post #409

eps wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query. All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.

It’s not a bad thing. People on there, if you piss them off in a discussion, will go find your old posts and downvote them and in some rare cases harass you by replying or worse put two and two together to doxx you.

Eh, for investigating scammers/bots it's a real pain in the ass.

Massive changes in posting history was a very good sign that an account was a farmed or stolen account.

Makes it a lot easier for reddit to deny their bot problem.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#745

Post by zahlman » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

fancyswimtime wrote: post #275

Aurornis wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda. Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies. Even when they can’t take over the actual mod positions, they’ll shower the mods with free product and make them feel like a VIP. I watched this happen from inside one company and I couldn’…

this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.

It's gone multiple ways in the past for not just city subreddits, but all kinds of regional ones. For example, r/canada has r/OnGuardForThee (because they thought the mods were allowing bigotry) and also (now private) r/RedEnsign (because, more or less, they thought the crowd making r/OnGuardForThee was falsely defaming them as bigots).

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#746

Post by zahlman » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

marcuskane2 wrote: post #548

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about a Reddit mod's incentives. They: - Don't get paid - Spend time having to do some really thankless work - Don't really have a regular work schedule So what kind of person is going to do it? Someone who is willing to do the work for no pay. For smaller subreddits and areas where the work of moderation isn't that heavy, you'll find passionate individuals. Mods that moderate more time consuming content or the…

There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills". People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community. People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spen…

> Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.

The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#747

Post by BryantD » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

LaurensBER wrote: post #365

BryantD wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet. I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theate…

While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience. There's many messages critical of immigrants on my timeline but none calling for violence against them (or any other group that Twitter users dislike). Meanwhile posts about violence against Trump, Musk or celebrating the dead of Kirk did get massive upvotes and visibility on some of the bi…

I have a different opinion of Twitter than you do, but that’s not actually the case I was making. I was pointing out that Twitter’s terms of service were modified to be less aggressive about calls for violence. If you’re correct and Twitter succeeds at not promoting hate and violence… why wouldn’t James Comer want to understand why?

My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.

Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#748

Post by amiga386 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #697

neilv wrote: post #84

I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade. And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda. What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this. A bad actor mod o…

Isn't the solution to "fork" the community? If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes). Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.

Yes, but how will you get the word out? The moderator can delete all your promotion of the breakaway subreddit within their subreddit. How are you going to get eyeballs?

And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.

Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#749

Post by twibs_io » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #705

twibs_io wrote: post #204

Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investig…

Not really. Most bootcamps are trash. Legal recourse would only be available if he said stuff that wasnt true

Did you read the article? It quotes him saying many things that aren't true. For that reason there probably is legal recourse for a defamation case, but it's the kind of thing that takes years, and costs a lot of money in the interim.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#750

Post by dkarl » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

tuesdaynight wrote: post #570

kranke155 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub. I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion. R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.

It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2]. People believe that these countries would love to…

They're using messaging all across the spectrum, including extreme viewpoints on both sides. There's a ton of discourse in leftist spaces online about the futility of voting, trying to paint people who believe in political engagement as naive, unsophisticated, or simply uncool.